To Boldly Go

William Shatner’s unmistakable voice opens the original Star Trek series.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!

A lot of debate went into these words. Ultimately, Gene Roddenberry made the final call, and “to boldly go” was immortalized and syndicated.

To boldly split an infinitive is more like it, am I right?!?

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself… but shouldn’t it be to go boldly? How about boldly to go? But both of those sound awful.

This is a great example of linguistic drift: when the meaning of a word or phrase changes over time. Sometimes what’s considered proper grammar can drift, too, and that’s what has happened here.

When I grew up, this rule about split infinitives was still being taught in school. We learned to never split up a verb phrase that had “to” at its start.

Did you notice that I just did the t…